In our new house there is an 20 m² basement, it consists of two rooms — both 10 m². I have turned the inner room into my new home office/server room, with my electronics lab and homelab.

I rebuilt the exhaust ventilation late 2017, but shortly after — I did the homelab ventilation project and had to remove parts of the exhaust system because it was in the way of the new insulated ducts. Time to rebuilt it!

The homelab is in my home office, man-cave, workshop — which is in the basement. The room is pretty well insulated, and heat generated here, mostly by the homelab, stays here. I needed a way to keep the temperature down in the hot summer months and during the cold winters. Well — this is it!

I’ve got a tiny computer lab at home; a 29U rack with servers, UPS, ATS, PDU, 10 Gbit networking, OPNsense, and all the cool stuff.

I used to smoke cigars in my home office, and the ventilation was pretty much set up for that. My duct fan was connected to an active carbon filter in the ceiling, to make sure the smoke would not be noticeable outside and leak back in when the bedroom windows were open in the summer months. That happened once, and the girlfriend did not approve.

Anyway; after I got the homelab properly set up, smoking cigars in the office just didn’t feel right… All that smoke drawn into the servers, heat-sinks, filters and so on. Never mind the lungs, think of the servers! So it was time to rebuild the exhaust ventilation system to better suit my new needs.